Tuesday, April 04, 2006

But Halliburton Repainted A School Somewhere!

· Plans for non-sectarian force under threat· Rice insists that power of militias must be curbed

Iraq's interior ministry is refusing to deploy thousands of police recruits who have been trained by the US and the UK and is hiring its own men and putting them on the streets, according to western security advisers.

The move is frustrating US and British efforts to build up a non-sectarian Iraqi police force which would not be infiltrated by partisan militias.

The disclosure highlights growing US and British concern about the role of militias in sectarian killings, and their links to senior Iraqi politicians. "You can't have in a democracy various groups with arms - you have to have the state with a monopoly on power," Condoleeza Rice, the US secretary of state, said at the end of her two-day visit to Baghdad yesterday.

This comes hard on the heels of Jaafari's laughing in Bush's face after Bush imperiously ordered him to step down.
Work harder, Bechtel and KBR contractors! Millions of Iranian soldiers are counting on you! Badr and Sadr can't wait to move into the lovely new bases you're building. (And you thought you were building them for the US! Silly you. Hey, but at least you're getting a few paychecks out of it.)

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